Friday, October 19, 2007

Plagerism Reaction

I had fun trying to find out where my fellow students plagiarized. I had a method to sniff out plagiarism. I would read their paper and any place that a sentence seem to be well structured or written then I would look it up on Google.com. Also most plagiarized sentences were longer than student students and in plagiarized instances there were slight changes in vocabulary. Also I noticed that if there was a common word used throughout the paper the word was a word used by its source excessively. Another strategy that I used was to was to type in their thesis onto Google.com, because I figured that if you were to be plagiarizing then there would a good chance that you would have the same or similar thesis. Lastly I combined all the knowledge above and tried to analysis the writing style of each classmate. I found myself to be effective at finding an instance of plagiarism the first time I searched Google.com. It was an interesting experience and I learned a lot from this experience. It's way easier to write your own paper then trying to conceal your writing with someone else voice because I spend more time trying to hide the evidence.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think the whole class agreed that plagiarism is harder than actually writing your own paper!

But somehow I had a copy of your paper to check...and I found two sources. I found the main website with the 5 mental health aspects in order...so ha! Just kidding...

It was a unique and challenging experience...both writing the paper and searching for others' plagiarism.

Andy said...

It sounds like you had an extraordinarily methodical approach for rooting out plagiarists! Personally, I had a devil of a time. Even though I knew the essay I read had been plagiarized I couldn't identify where. During the entire class period I only cracked open one paper. Realizing how likely I would have been to pass any of those essays in other circumstances is disquieting. I wonder if that keeps instructors awake at night?